Middle East Still Suffers From Fallout of Warfare : Legacy: Rubble clearing goes on, and the historical impact of Iraq’s defeat is not yet in view.

Only an occasional helicopter and the shuttle flight to Basra cross the skies over Baghdad these days. A year ago, 2 hours and 40 minutes past midnight, every quarter was etched with chilling violence, tracer shells slicing upward toward unseen fighter-bombers, Saddam Hussein’s capital shaking with explosions. The Persian Gulf War had begun.

It lasted only six weeks; the ground offensive drove the Iraqi army from Kuwait in just four days. But the brief, brutal conflict, and the six-month confrontation that preceded it, scarred the Middle East, particularly its politics. The shock waves are still reverberating, and it’s too soon to tell whether the Iraqi defeat will have a lasting legacy such as, for instance, the deep divisions left by the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Positive results are few: Kuwait is liberated, the Iraqi war machine smashed and the shrouds removed from Baghdad’s hidden experiments in nuclear and chemical warfare. The diplomatic momentum of victory gave the Bush Administration the clout to assemble the Middle East peace talks.

The casualties are clear: Hunger and disease for the Iraqi people--Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Kurds--still oppressed by a brutal leader; hundreds of thousands of Palestinians cast out of the Gulf states and into poverty in Jordan. The oil sheiks show no sign of reconciliation with countries that tilted to Iraq. A tide of fundamentalism surges against the weakened foundations of secular states.

A year after the first bombs fell on Baghdad, the rubble is still being cleared, and the historical impact of the war can only start to be measured. The postwar developments:

IRAQ

Hussein and his loyal legions, most of them purchased by privilege, have kept a lid on simmering discontent. In the north, the regime has played carrot-and-stick with the Kurds, blockading food supplies and offering calculated deals on autonomy.

But, bottom line, the Baghdad government has no control over wide stretches of the mountainous north. Kurdish guerrillas, outgunned, present only a thin defensive line, but they are backed by a civilian population in continuous rebellion against Baghdad’s control. Hussein cannot use his air power to terrorize the Kurds for risk of losing it to American warplanes operating out of Turkish bases.

In the south, the Shiite Muslim population, an estimated 60% of Iraq’s 17 million people, live under the guns of the Iraqi army and its overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim officer corps. Both sides are edgy; memories of the blood baths of the spring rebellion are still sharp. Prisons are filled with Shiite civilians, and arrests continue.

In Baghdad and the surrounding Sunni heartland, the authority of the regime is tested by economic collapse. Middle-class families are desperate, with inflation galloping at an annual rate of more than 1,000%. Only the army has received pay raises.

Yet Hussein remains, isolated but in power. He has shuffled his Cabinet five times since the war ended, bringing the key ministries--police, military--into the hands of his immediate family. Exiled opponents of the regime insist that there have been at least three major coup attempts staged within the military. All failed and were followed by widespread executions, the exiles report.

The U.N. economic embargo remains in place a year after the war began. U.S. and other allied warships in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aqaba are still stopping vessels suspected of carrying contraband goods for Iraq. The sanctions will remain in place until Hussein complies fully with the cease-fire agreement, and he has so far resisted in at least one category--fully disclosing Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological warfare capabilities.

Food, which is not banned, is crossing the Turkish, Iranian and Jordanian borders, but it is prohibitively priced by the time it reaches the capital. Medicine, also exempt, is even scarcer.

A comprehensive study in October funded by the U.N. Children’s Fund, British Oxfam and two American foundations estimated that close to a million Iraqi children are malnournished and more than 100,000 are starving. “Like living dead,” said one of the researchers, Prof. Magne Raundalen of the University of Bergen in Norway. Only about 40% of electrical capacity has been restored, and power shortages have disabled water-purification and sewage plants. Most Iraqis are drinking contaminated water.

Since last summer, a U.N. program has been available to Hussein that would open the blockade enough to let Iraq sell $1.6 billion worth of oil to buy food and medicine but would require that some of the proceeds be set aside for war reparations to Kuwait. The plan also requires international supervision to assure that supplies go to the needy. Iraq has rejected the proposal as a violation of its sovereignty, and negotiations last week failed to resolve the differences.

More than $4 billion worth of Iraqi assets remain sequestered in Western banks, and Hussein is maneuvering to pry some of them loose. (London released $125 million two months ago when Baghdad freed a Briton who had been jailed on espionage charges. Rumors in the Middle East say that Germany may be the next country to unfreeze Iraqi assets.)

KUWAIT

The scars of fighting and last-minute Iraqi destruction--most hotels, for instance, were torched by retreating troops--have been erased in Kuwait city. The skies have been clear since early November, when the last of more than 700 sabotaged and burning oil well fires were extinguished by an international brigade of firefighters.

But from the city limits outward, the sheikdom remains a deathtrap for the unwary. More than a million land mines still lie buried in the desert, and the loss of life during removal operations has already exceeded the Kuwaiti casualties in war.

The other curse of the countryside is spilled oil. North and south of the capital, the giant oil fields are coated with crude, up to four inches deep in places, that spewed from damaged wells. Lakes of oil an acre or more in size are seeping into the desert. Paul Horsman, who led a Greenpeace environmental survey of Kuwait and the Gulf recently, estimated that at least a million migratory birds will die in the oil lakes.

Horsman told a Washington press conference last week that 15,000 to 30,000 birds have already been killed by Gulf oil spills that washed up along 460 miles of Saudi coastline and damaged fisheries in the Gulf waters as well. Ashore in Kuwait, the result was equally harsh. “Sand is glued up with oil,” Horsman said. “Trees and grass are covered with a thick layer of tar. The damage is quite staggering.” Environmentalists can only guess at the long-term damage.

A U.N. disaster fund established to coordinate cleanup efforts has received contributions from just 12 countries, the United States not among them, the Greenpeace official said.

Kuwait Oil Co. has begun exporting crude again, initially in small amounts, but the company is predicting a return to prewar levels by the end of 1992. And the shopping streets of the capital blaze with neon at night.

But liberation from the Iraqi army has not eased deep-rooted anxieties. Four-wheel-drive trucks have replaced sleek American sedans as the car of choice, in case some new calamity sends Kuwaitis rolling across to the desert to safety.

Population of the sheikdom has been nearly halved, with more than 300,000 Palestinians sent packing for their perceived endorsement of the Iraqi invasion and with tens of thousands of cautious Kuwaitis still living abroad. The ruling emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, is back in his palace, and the postwar promise of democratic reforms has lost steam.

Parliamentary elections are scheduled for October, but women’s suffrage--long accepted in some neighboring countries such as Iraq, Iran and Jordan--no longer seems a sure thing in Kuwait.

GULF SECURITY

After the grueling 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War and the seven-month Persian Gulf crisis, tensions along the strategic waterway remain high. Baghdad, which prosecuted the so-called tanker war that lit up the Gulf five years ago, is out of the game now, but Muslim Iran, which controls half the Gulf shoreline, is flexing its muscles.

Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the smaller oil sheikdoms have been unable to find a path to postwar security. Their regional alliance, the Gulf Cooperation Council, failed last month to agree on a proposed 100,000-man GCC standing army.

Diplomatic pressure from Iran helped torpedo implementation of the postwar Damascus Declaration that would have given Egypt and Syria a role in Gulf security.

For now, with Iran rearming with Moscow-supplied tanks and aircraft, the Gulf states are relying on the Western alliance that drove the Iraqis from Kuwait. The United States, Britain and France are setting up a series of access agreements on Gulf airfields and ports. They cover the oil states but agitate Iran.

“Iran’s revolutionary Muslim people recognize no false hegemony for America or any other power,” the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian spiritual leader, warned last week.

The dim prospect of peace between Iran and Iraq, proffered by Baghdad in the first weeks of the Gulf crisis, was snuffed out in the Shiite Muslim uprising in southern Iraq last March. Tehran backed the losing rebels and continues to stir the embers there.

Meanwhile, U.S. and allied warships implementing the U.N. blockade continue to patrol Gulf waters, the Arabian Sea beyond and the Gulf of Aqaba approach to Jordan, guarding against contraband headed for Iraq. “They’re still boarding ships and checking cargoes,” said a Western diplomat in Amman, the Jordanian capital. “Nothing has changed.”

The last American ground troops in the Gulf left Kuwait last month for their Atlantic Alliance bases in Western Europe, but U.S. air power is still deployed on naval carriers and some airfields in the Gulf states and Turkey.

THE FALLOUT

Middle East politicians still talk about the Arab world, but whatever they have in mind is not the political landscape that existed before Iraq’s Aug. 2, 1990, invasion of Kuwait. The war exposed old wounds and opened new ones. The Arab League splintered and collapsed. Pro-Moscow Syria threw in with the Western allies. Saudi Arabia shut down its oil line to pro-Iraqi Jordan and closed the border. Then it tossed out more than a million Yemeni workers. Yasser Arafat embraced Hussein, and the Palestinians paid a devastating price.

Political truths emerged. A disintegrating Soviet Union could no longer play godfather to the anti-Western Arab states. Pan-Arabism--along with Iraq, its latest exponent--cannot stand as an ideal against the vested interests of different societies. American power and Saudi money is now the strongest combination in the region.

Washington has used its postwar influence to break through the wall between Israel and its Arab adversaries. Nothing in the political air prior to the Kuwait invasion suggested that this was possible. Hussein wrapped himself in the flag of Palestine after the invasion, but it seemed a crass expedient and failed to rally most Arabs to his cause.

Whatever the outcome of the Washington-engineered peace talks, the wounds of Arab division will take a long time to heal. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the other Gulf states, and their pro-Western but non-democratic governments, appear to be banking on their money and Western protectors for security.

Egypt, Jordan and other countries that do not produce oil seem to remain international welfare cases.

Money was always a major factor to Hussein as well. He launched the war in part over a squabble on oil prices. With his production damaged by war with Iran, he wanted a high price, $25 a barrel. Now his production is ruined, and the price is less than $19. And if Iraq starts exporting, there will be more downward pressure, one of the many lessons now clear one year after the Gulf War began.